Ms. Fathima Rayammarakkar Fasal is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai. Her doctoral research focuses on urban spaces, migrant communities, and land transformation in Bengaluru. She is researching urban local markets to understand how ethno-religious migrant communities co-produce spaces significant for local businesses in the city and negotiate with the dynamics of land transformation politics. Ms. Fasal has presented her research at various international conferences, including a presentation on urban aestheticization politics and land claims of a fishing community in Chennai at the European Sociological Association’s Urban Sociology Conference in Berlin and another on “Southern Urbanism as a Non-western Methodology for Urban Research” at the Ireland-India Institute’s South Asia conference.
Ms. Fasal has an interdisciplinary background with an M.A. in women’s studies and B.A. in social sciences from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai and Hyderabad respectively. This interdisciplinary training reflects the choice and methodology of her ongoing research, which combines concepts from multiple disciplines such as sociology, urban studies, human geography and social history. Ms. Fasal has obtained Junior Research Fellowship (2018) in women’s studies and cleared UGC NET (2022) in sociology. She also worked as a research assistant on a UNICEF project at the National Law School of India University, Bangalore. Besides academics, Ms. Fasal enjoys cooking, cinema and traveling.
During her Fulbright Nehru Doctoral Research fellowship, Ms. Fasal is striving to valorize the heterogeneity of experiences and knowledge about Global South cities and is conducting comparative research on migrant economies and urbanisms.